292) Wendy James - Now Ain't The Time For Your Tears

I always thought Wendy James knew what she was doing. She loved to provoke with her comments, go on Top of the Pops in stockings and suspenders to draw attention to herself and appear in the tabloids as much as the music press. Luckily for her Transvision Vamp were huge so she was everywhere and then suddenly they went from number one to not even getting their third record released in the UK and split.

What to do? Wendy didn’t write the songs in Transvision Vamp, so she wrote a letter to Elvis Costello who with, then wife, Cait O’Riordan seemingly wrote ten songs in one weekend and gave them to her as her record.

Wendy gleefully recorded them, the record bombed, and she didn’t release a record for another eleven years.

At the time she was delighted but has said now she is not sure if Costello was looking at her career and passing comment. From the lyrics you may think so, Puppet Girl “Hey there little puppet girl, how do you learn to talk that way,” or Do You Know What I’m Saying “She danced like an ambulance, talked like a cartoon mouse, she took off her clothes and it brought down the house.” I guess only Elvis knows, I’ve found nothing on the internet.

I didn’t mind Transvision Vamp and picked this up on CD not long after it came out and enjoyed it. It’s been unavailable for years and I found on vinyl in a second-hand shop for a fiver. A no-brainer.

So, I have probably not listened to it in nearly thirty years and during this time it’s often mentioned as a record that should have not happened. Well, we all have records that other people didn’t like but I enjoy it.

London’s Brilliant is cleary a nod to The Clash (Strummer and Jones get a name check and Wendy was Mick’s girlfriend as one point), it should have been the first single instead of The Nameless One that apart from lovely shimmering guitar this was not going to trouble the charts back then, it didn’t.

Wendy was often criticised for her voice but on the ballads on this record I find it effective and vulnerable in equal measure. Basement Kiss is a wonderful song, delivered perfectly by her and backed expertly by the band (Attraction Pete Thomas is the drummer throughout) and Earthbound she starts all vulnerable before the band come in and she matches them all the way.

Fill in the Blanks is sadly filler, but I Want to Stand Forever is an orchestral number and with Wendy coming across like Marianne Faithfull, a fine end to the record. I am not sure if Costello was judging her or not. I hope not, and to be fair to him he did not need to give her ten songs.

This record is certainly not the disaster that many claimed but at this point I think, sadly Wendy’s time was up. She has since returned and released several solo records, can’t keep a fighter down,

 7/10

GIVE IT A STREAM: You cannot but the whole the album is on YouTube and is worth forty minutes of anyone’s time, best track Basement Kiss