The House of Love

About Event

PERRL presents The House of Love at the Norwich Arts Centre

Norwich Arts Centre | 51 St Benedicts Street, Norwich, NR2 4PG

Please contact Norwich Arts Centre for any accessibility enquiries. 

Please note, ticket price includes £1 venue levy

Shiny ringing guitars, pseudo-psychedelic melodies, and bursts of noise.

Known for jangly, atmospheric guitars, emotionally charged lyrics, and a sound that helped bridge indie rock, neo-psychedelia, and early shoegaze.

By September 1985, the month the Jesus & Mary Chain played the Electric Ballroom in Camden, the Creation record label was two years old.  1983 had seen the release of just one single – the Legend’s proto-rap single, ‘’73 In ‘83’, a record so badly received that Alan McGee retreated, preferring to spend the remainder of the year promoting his ever-popular club, the Living Room. 1984 had seen a clutch of releases, culminating in November with the Jesus & Mary Chain’s debut single, ‘Upside Down’.

‘Upside Down’ was game-changer for Creation – sales of 40,000 dwarfed the label’s normal performance levels of around 1,000 copies per release.  It was also something of a game-changer for indie, drawing in a number of people whose thirst for the kind of shock and awe the band created hadn’t been sated since the heady days of punk.  People flocked to their gig at the Ambulance Station at the Old Kent Road, turned out in even bigger numbers at an Ides of March show at North London Polytechnic (where a ‘riot’ supposedly ensued) and then made their way to the Electric Ballroom hoping for the spectacle to repeat itself. Which, of course, it did.

The Electric Ballroom had been a local patch for Guy Chadwick, having moved down to Camden from a village outside Rugby with the express intention of forming a band and, who knows, carving out some sort of legacy. Like The Jesus & Mary Chain, he too had had a record released in 1984.  A band called The Kingdoms was largely built around Guy’s talents as a guitarist/singer-songwriter.  Guy had been signed up to CBS publishing and The Kingdoms had landed a one-off deal with RCA, who in the summer had released the band’s one-and-only single, ‘Heartlands’.

Writing in 2007, Alan McGee – an outsider arguably closer to the epicentre than anyone else – said the following: ‘House Of Love were a great Creation band…. I loved them and was gutted they never stayed on Creation. For one year they could have taken anyone on live. Terry was a true genius, Guy a master songwriter, the recipe for bigtime success still to this day. They were a one-off.’

McGee’s fondness for the isolated period of 1987/8 when they became all-conquering, when mistakes couldn’t be made and when disappointments couldn’t materialise surely reflects the ephemeral nature of pop brilliance, which burns brightly for a while before inevitably fading. The critic Simon Reynolds – he who had described the band as ‘the sun gone into supernova’  – also spoke of the group’s ‘radiant immediacy’, suggesting perhaps that such a wondrous thing can only last for a moment.

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