Very much the one that got away, ST.VITUS DANCE’S one and only album “Love Me, Love My Dogma” was originally sneaked out into the marketplace by Geoff Davies’s Probe Plus label in the summer of 1987. It made a few decent-sized waves in the band’s Belfast locale but largely bypassed a British indie public who were at the time crying into their beer when David Gedge’s girlfriend was about to leave him (again) come the latest Wedding Present single.
Throwing caution to the wind, St.Vitus Dance gave it their best shot by re-locating to Liverpool after the album’s release, but despite a German tour with PP labelmates Jeggsy Dodd & The Sons Of Harry Cross, a combination of poverty, lack of opportunity and apathy finally put paid to them by the tail end of 1988 and – aside from singer Noel Burke’s stint as frontman with the under-rated post-McCulloch Bunnymen in the early ‘90s – that was pretty much that.
Except that now Probe Plus have done the decent thing and re-issued that sole St.Vitus Dance album with a brace of excellent extra tracks and while it’s unlikely it’ll set the world alight second time round, at the very least “Love Me, Love My Dogma…And Then Some” deserves to pick up a fresh cadre of discerning folk still searching high and low for intelligent guitar-based sounds amid the dross of the clinical 21st Century.
Because, put simply, it’s a fine and consistent album full of elegant tunes and taut performances topped and tailed by some consistently charismatic vocals from the still criminally under-rated Burke. Indeed, although the album was laid down in a matter of days at a studio in County Down for a meagre £360 it rarely shows as the group are well-drilled and confident throughout and proffering a guitar-based sound liberally embellished (a la Attractions, Wild Swans) by Haydn Boyle’s gracefully prominent piano and keyboards. Yes, occasionally the synth sound is a little dated, but hell: what do you expect from an album recorded In the mid-1980s?
Besides, the songs themselves are more than enough to surmount such shortcomings. Like The Undertones before them, St.Vitus may have come from the Troubles-torn streets of Northern Ireland, but their muse was of a much more personal nature and instead of the expected political diatribes, we get catchy, but idiosyncratic tunes about nightlife, drinking in sleazy bars and catching black cabs home and one track (“Napoleon’s Nose”) where the shape of a rocky outcrop overlooking Belfast apparently gets compared to a certain French emperor’s hooter, though you’d hardly know it from the lyrics.
Intrigued? Well, you should be, because there’s loads here to get your teeth into, not least the album’s two minor-classics, “The Silence” and “Meet Mohammed.” The former opens the album with its’ classy, waltz-time piano motif and Burke’s seriously sophisticated croon cutting quite a swathe. It’s still wholly tempting almost 20 years on, as is “Meet Mohammed”: surely the coolest tune ever penned about rushing for a taxi when the pubs throw out and featuring great tongue-in-cheek lyrics like “I was the man of the moment, and the moment was lost” – sadly true where Noel is concerned, it seems.
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Elsewhere, they casually cruise through great singles that should’ve been like the full-tilt “Perish The Thought” and the proud’n’anthemic “Horse Sense” where yet another fine Burke vocal is propelled onwards and upwards by tremendous drumming from Peter Hesketh. The romantic “Dancing Class”, meanwhile, showcases a lighter touch; “Contemptible” finds Boyle’s keyboards stabbing out a classic proto-house emblem and “Have No Fear” even namechecks the sadly late Roy Castle. And that’s more than good enough for me.
The previously unreleased tracks from the band’s last 1988 session are a positive boon too. “Rubble Every Time” and “Know Your Enemy” feature Dave Thom (accordion) and Gone To Earth’s Dave Clarke (fiddle) and find St.Vitus sliding into a slower, sombre roots-y area that really suited them. Not that they’d forgotten how to write pop hooks, mind, as the closing “Strong Drink” and “For God’s Sake Agnes” are two slices of fine, nagging indie-Motown that get under your skin with ease. The latter’s title demonstrates that The Mystery Jets weren’t the first to get the name Agnes into a great pop tune either.
These tracks briefly open a window to a future that should have been, but sadly never was. However, recent re-union gigs in Belfast and Liverpool have been enough to prompt the band to write songs for a belated, Stone Roses-style follow-up, so maybe it’s not quite the end of the story after all. Regardless of all that, though, these fifteen songs are a slim volume of excellence that St.Vitus Dance should always be proud of and more of us ought to get off our arses to track down pretty damn quickly.
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