Back in 1984 when I first listened to this album I was a new student at Sheffield University and a hopeless romantic, in the sense that I was hopeless at it. Like Lloyd I would regularly fall in love and imagine scenarios where someone would be impressed by my literary allusions and knowledge of On The Waterfront, before realising that it was unlikely they would be interested in a computer geek with less than perfect skin, and I would go back to studying Pascal (the programming language not the philosopher).
Musically, this jangly guitar pop sounded great on my hifi that I’d blown half my grant money on, and I found that I could still remember all of the words 40 years or more after first hearing them. Lyrically, it's as arch and earnest as you might expect from a university philosophy student who's been listening to a bit too much Bob Dylan, but I definitely related to it at the time. It wasn’t entirely a surprise to find out that Lloyd was also painfully shy and dreaded live shows to the point where he would perform with his back to the audience.
Does it hold up? Nostalgia is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but I did enjoy the new to me bonus tracks that weren't on my cassette tape copy back in the day. Was it influential? Probably not, but it did have an influence on me, so I’m giving it 4 stars for old times sake.
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