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The Windmills
Title: Sunlight
There would be enough evidence from the
Melodie Group recordings alone to suggest that Roy Thirlwall is one of the great
unsung songwriters of the current age, but thankfully there's even more proof in
the recordings of The Windmills. In The Windmills Thirlwall joins forces with
Dan and Tony Pankhurst, Pete Spicer and Rob Clarke, and in doing so produces
some of the finest, most upliftingly down-beat Pop since, well, I have to say it
again, since East Village ripped hearts apart with their awesome beat noise back
in the late '80s and early '90s. There's clearly some kind of homage being paid
to East Village in the sound of The Windmills, but that might be just my
thoughts running away with me, and really unfair anyway because the Windmills
themselves actually formed initially in 1984 themselves, so maybe it's truer to
say that East Village sounded like The Windmills, but there you go. It's
probably also true to say that Windmills are still (rightly and thankfully) in
thrall of groups like prime Go-Betweens, or The Loft when they were well oiled
and lubricating the Living Room, or Hurrah! at their absolute magnificent peak,
or Hellfire Sermons at their most roped in and melodic best, which is to say the
best of all you can imagine. Windmills are taught and tense, languorous and
cooler than cool all at once, which is no mean feat. After their reformation in
1999 they laid the groundwork on the excellent Edge Of August album and
have now delivered another real beauty of a record in the new Sunlight
collection. There are so many minor Pop classics on Sunlight it's simply
criminal that they aren't airing full time on MTV instead of shit like the
godawful Starsailor. There's only so much weary talk of 'authenticity' you can
take when it comes to Pop, after all, and if the likes of Starsailor go to such
great lengths to convince us of their 'worthiness' and 'sensitivity', then you
just know they've got to be faking it; turning on the manufactured 'sadness' for
the plastic tears of the massed ranks of 'tortured' students, so sad because the
girl they fancy from their Chemistry class likes Destiny's Child instead of the
Stereophonics. The Windmills, on the other hand, simply go their own way,
by-passing the usual 'references' and short-circuiting notions of 'authenticity'
by being only natural, by dipping and rising in the manner of the long-distance
runner in the mists by the canal every December morning. And naturally The
Windmills make sounds for the Autumnal and Winter months, dropping notes that
remind of summer and its hazy smiles in the most elliptical of manners. Previous
singles 'Drug Autumn' and 'When It Was Winter' are simply gorgeous moments;
perfect Pop events frozen in time by the finest of sculptors hands. 'When it was
Winter' especially is something to behold, being all magnificent fuzzy chords
and crystalline notes bending into the heavens like the Northern Lights just
visible in the sky over the tops of the shipyard cranes; a bunch of
ragged-hearted Beat outsiders singing a hymn to the moment held in time, guitars
clutched high and tight and proud.
The snow is all gone, and I love The
Windmills with all of my heart.
Paul Reed
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