Punk rock is all abrasive, rudimentary tunes and sweaty grunting from the (usually male) great unwashed, right? Nah, if you’re going around thinking that then you’ve yet to have the pleasure of getting bonafide Welsh indie mega-legends Helen Love in your deprived earholes. So, to put that right, their original record label, the equally legendary Damaged Goods, have heaped together the toppest, most gleeful, tracks from the first decade-ish of the Swansea band’s career into one glorious ‘best of’ style compilation. Honestly, you’re in for a treat here.
To introduce Helen Love as a punk group is perhaps doing the full scope of their output a disservice, although with a gold-plated endorsement from the late King Joey Ramone himself, countless Ramones references scattered about their discography and a vocal adoration for the scuzziness of a fuzzbox we doubt the group would have any issues with that assertion, but away from the three-chord sphere there’s plenty of twee and glam bubblegum-pop to boot. Maybe glitter-punk is a better descriptor?
A hot blast of distorted guitar greets us from the off with the title track’s bold introduction of ‘Yeah Yeah We’re Helen Love’, providing the listener with a distinct and unerring outline of what to expect over the span of the record or even their thirty-year career: “Super Kay guitars and Casiotone, ‘Sheena Is A Punk’ on the stereo, plug in your fuzzbox, ready to play, from Swansea Bay to the USA”.
The earliest of the songs included, ‘Joey Ramoney’, ‘Love, Kiss, Run, Sing, Shout, Jump!’, ‘So Hot’, ‘Golden Summer’ and the original version of ‘Punk Boy’ (the rework complete with Joey Ramone feature comes later on), all circa 1993-1994, are as lo-fi as records get – the sound of some unsuspecting teenage pop-kids with a knack for an addictive melody mucking about with a piece of home-recording kit, splurging all of their fandom and sunny disposition out on some brightly coloured vinyl, who ended up getting a surprise, but entirely deserved, lauding from John Peel and the Melody Maker.
Even though they never really graduate from 8-track second-hand tape machine production, their songwriting goes on to become more robust with carefully crafted and concise glittering nuggets like the mendaciously gritty ‘Beat Him Up’, seeing Love come to the protectively vicious aid of a friend suffering domestic abuse, and ‘Girl About Town’s tale of a returning ex-rocker who “got signed to a record label, spent the advance on a pinball table, sold a hundred records to all our friends, now she’s back again”.
The greatest picks off the compilation come from the band’s late 90s and very early 2000s releases, a string of total punk-pop bliss a-sides and b-sides. The unmistakable tuneful synth-assault, repeating “Atari Teenage Riot” vocal and newly adopted happy-hardcore sample launches ‘Does Your Heart Go Booooooomm’s recounting of a chap who has a reckless Kula Shaker induced-breakdown but finds salvation in Alec Empire’s digital hardcore dirge. On ‘Sunburst Super Kay’ the group mercilessly mock a neighbour who took patronising umbrage at their “Woolworths cheap guitars”, chiding “Now they’re fixing window seals/ and we’ve got a record deal/ Saw them just the other day and laughed straight in their faces”. They then take that same merciless mocking and aim it at the entire Britpop movement with ‘Long Live The UK Music Scene’, ensuring everyone from Oasis to Shed Seven and Alan McGee to Chris Evans gets a bit of their taunting ire.
‘Leader Of The Pack’ pays brilliant homage to The Shangri-Las sixties girl-group classic with Helen Love’s own song featuring dirty guitars and Elton John-style rock’n’roll piano, ‘King of Kung-Fu’ potentially paying indie-lads Ash back a favour with a similarly titled offering to their own ‘Kung Fu’, after the Irish trio put out a cover of ‘Punk Boy’. Album track from the group’s debut LP proper, ‘Love and Glitter, Hot Days and Musik’, ‘Jump Up And Down’ sounds like an intentional glammed up, punked out, lipstick daubed antithesis to Technohead’s 1995 atrocity ‘I Wanna Be A Hippy’ with an unearthly refrain of ‘Wanna be a punk, wanna be a punk rocker’.
And this all takes the collection neatly up to its latter era with the band’s 2004 piece-de-resistance, ‘Debbie Loves Joey’, a transposition of punk’s most iconic coupling (Blondie’s legendary Harry and the oft-mentioned Ramone) onto an innocuous 1980s pair of loved-up kids who fall for each other on the bus after a school disco, set to short, sharp jabs of guitar fuzz and jubilant Casio keyboards.
Few bands embody the DIY spirit, with their pritt stick anime and Nintendo magazine collage artwork, and the, now tragically largely lost, pastime of weaving about Camden High Street and Soho’s Berwick Street record stores searching for out-of-print day-glo 7” singles moreso than Helen Love and this revisiting of the initial part of their career masterfully captures everything that made them so special from the off, with delicious buzzsaw riffs, original girl power, cutting humour, lazer guns and glitter balls still firmly in place.
‘Yeah Yeah We’re Helen Love’ was released this summer, on 23rd June 2023, via Damaged Goods records and you can nab yourself a copy right now.
You can watch the promo video for ‘Does Your Heart Go Boom’ below.
Edge of Arcady 