![]() The first work he ever did was a ‘Gathering Dust’ 11-inch single, and the last work he ever did was ‘I Melt with You.’ He started with us, and ended with us. “He was our friend,” says Grey of Oliver, who also worked with the band in later years for their seventh album, Soundtrack, in 2007. Oliver, who passed away December 2019 at the age of 62, was responsible for some of the most iconic album cover art throughout the past four decades, including Modern English’s fellow 4AD label partners at the time, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and Clan of Xymox and later crafted the abstract surrealism of the Pixies’ Doolittle and The Breeders’ candied heart burst of Last Splash. Grey laughs that “I Melt With You” is always the last song in the band’s set, because they wouldn’t know how the audience may react if they played anything following it.Ĭoming full circle with “I Melt With You,” the band called on their longtime friend, artist Vaughan Oliver to create the cover art work for the track prior to the band’s now-postponed 40th anniversary tour. In 2011, the song’s title even inspired I Melt with You, an artsy drama, starring Rob Lowe and Jeremy Piven, unraveling a college reunion that goes awry. Several years later, the band re-recorded “I Melt with You” on fifth album, 1990’s Pillow Lips, following Modern English’s reformation with founding member Mick Conroy and Aaron Davidson. Overshadowing other After the Snow singles “Life in the Gladhouse” and “Someone’s Calling,” “I Melt With You,” was first popularized when it was featured in the 1983 Nicolas Cage teen rom-com Valley Girl. Never comprehending the race has long gone by I made a pilgrimage to save this human race listeners more, giving it an almost West Coast feel. Recording in the English countryside also gave After the Snow a very pastoral sound, which Grey says resonated with U.S. I’ll stop the world and melt with you “I Melt with You,” artwork by Vaughan Oliver He showed me how to stand in front of a microphone and just talk into it, so that’s how you get that almost spoken word thing, which is what I think is kind of the charm of it, I suppose.” “I wrote the words, but I never actually stood next to a mic and talked into it before. “He put them all in an order, and that’s how the musical side of it came about with the lyrics,” shares Grey. Grey says that after their rehearsals with the producer, they had all these fragments of music and didn’t know what to do with them, but Jones helped the band configure them into songs, including the parts of “I Melt with You.” We used to call them pieces, little bits of music we’d stick together, almost like we were glueing it.” “At the time, we did not write songs that went verse, chorus, verse, chorus. ![]() “He came to see us play, and he heard all our noisy stuff,” says Grey. Under the tutelage of producer Hugh Jones, who had already worked with Echo & the Bunnymen, Simple Minds, and The Damned at this point, the band pieced together the final arrangement around “I Melt With You,” right down to the indelible break of Hmmm hmmm hmmm. We never really thought about it, so it was really exciting to do.” ![]() We never used acoustic guitars before or string arrangements, but that’s the first time on After the Snow. “We didn’t want to keep going over the same ground, so when the producer joined, he started to bring melody to the table. Good luck finding the nog in August though.“I Melt With You” marks the band’s shift from the noisier punk of their earlier singles and 1981 debut Mesh & Lace-the title also referenced in the song-to the more new wave pop of After the Snow. And as a gift for you, we’ve assembled 65 Christmas songs so incredibly catchy, you just might want to listen all year round. But festive cheer has found its way into pop, hip-hop, R&B, metal, punk, indie… you name it. There is, of course, something of a Christmas canon: ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ and ‘Fairytale of New York’ are great songs… which is good, as inevitably you’re going to hear them about a million times this holidays. But even more cynical later generations of pop have produced plenty of gold. There are plenty of keepers from the ‘40s-‘70s heyday of the Christmas record as an art form. Love them, hate them, or just accept them as a sort of immutable fact of life, Christmas songs are a thing, and as December 25 gets inexorably closer and closer they’re a thing that becomes increasingly inescapable.Īnd although there’s been a fair amount of disposable novelty rubbish written over the years, the reality is that a lot of Christmas songs are bangers.
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