According to Conor Deasy, the inspiration for ‘What Ever Happened to Corey Haim’, the lead single from Let’s Bottle Bohemia, is this: “We live in a time when popular culture has reached an all time low. It’s a culture of good fortune and gloating, where really vacant people with nothing to say are idolised.”
Conor, a pop idol, also thinks this: “A hooker with a heart of gold/A cheap date that can’t be sold/Won’t send you to an early grave/ Oh-oh-oh-oh”. (‘You Can’t Fool Old Friends With Limousines’).
Nothing vacant there, and not the slightest double standard.
Pop isn’t all about having something to say, but when you ask the question of others, you have to answer it yourself, and there is no redeeming Conor Deasy’s bad poetry. It’s a mess of non sequiturs, clichés from cancelled cop shows and trite evocations of a non-existent way of American life—“So let’s split tonight/I got a tank full of gas to light” (‘Not For All The Love In The World’). With added Awrights.
Of course, saying something isn’t just done with words. It’s done with your noise and your individuality and the freedom that they express. The Thrills will never lack a melody, and ‘Tell Me Something I Don’t Know’, ‘Saturday Night’ and ‘Found My Rosebud’ leap out. But you can’t express freedom when you’re not free; when you’re in thrall to a fictional America — cue Conor’s wispy midwestern croak, by now beyond parody — and to the past. Peter Buck plays almost inaudible mandolin on ‘Faded Beauty Queens’ and Van Dyke Parks’ genius with strings is wasted on ‘The Irish Keep Gate-crashing’, a hoedown, purely so The Thrills can feel validated by history.
What’s missing from The Thrills is trust that their internal lives, unobscured by secondhand imagery and legs up from heroes for hire, will be enough to sustain us. Of course it will! Internal lives are amazing, intriguing things; Ulysses is just a Dub talking to himself for the day. We are all endlessly mysterious and complex from the moment of birth. Sing about that.
A key line: “The curse of comfort has plagued your artistic life” (‘The Curse Of Comfort’). Maybe Conor Deasy thinks he hasn’t suffered enough. Bono, who said he would carry The Thrills’ luggage, worked with Van Dyke Parks once, on ‘All I Want Is You’, on an album also too heavily in debt to history. His band nearly disintegrated and had to head to Hansa to bring back the best music of U2’s life.
Maybe Bono could bend someone’s ear: five broken hearts and five flights to Berlin, please. Then we might be on to something.