Bob Geldof - DEEP IN THE HEART OF NOWHERE - 1986

Track Listing

1. This Is the World Calling (3:59)
2. In The Pouring Rain (4:32)
3. August Was A Heavy Month (5:15)
4. Love Like A Rocket (4:50)
5. I Cry Too (4:27)
6. When I Was Young (5:01)
7. This Heartless Heart (4:15)
8. The Beat Of The Night (5:11)
9. Truly, True Blue (1:19)
10. Pulled Apart By Horses (4:29)
11. Words From Heaven (4:19)
12. Good Boys In The Wrong (5:18)
13. Night Turns To Day (4:53)
14. Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere (1:18)

All songs written by Bob Geldof, except "Love Like A Rocket" (Geldof / Doom)
All songs published by NOB Music / Intersong Music Ltd., except
tracks 1 & 4 by NOB Music / Intersong Music Ltd. / RCA Music Ltd.  

Mercury (CD 830 607-2, UK)  

Very Deep, with lots of heart 

By RS Wayment
(San Antonio, TX, USA)

This was Geldof's first solo album and it came out about a year after Live Aid. No reviewer seemed to know what to make of it. If Geldof had come out with something as good as Blood on the Tracks or as bad as M. C. Hammers gangsta rap album, the reviews wouldn't have been much different than theywere. They all said it was good, but not great. For me, it was more complicated than that. Some of the songs are truly great. Some sound like two or three different song-bits fitted together by a huge production.  And sometimes that works. But it doesn't always feel fully-formed. It almost seems like the songs got onto tape too soon after being thought of without enough time for Geldof to walk around with them in his head and make sure he liked them all. But there is a purity and a directness in the songs. All articulate genuine emotion, most are catchy, and a few are some of my favourite songs in the world. Geldof sounds every bit as frazzled to the bone as he no doubt was after two years of non-stop famine work. But the whole thing is soaked in the soothing pop sounds of the absolutely stellar musicians and production artists involved: Dave Stuart, Brian Setzer, Allison Moyet, Midge Ure, Clem Burke, Maria McKee, Annie Lennox, Jooles Holland, and Eric Clapton, to name a few. The combination works most of the time. In fact, I love the album. My only real complaints  are:

1.) The LP version looses three songs and contains a hideous edit to the song "When I Was Young" which deflates its emotional buildup. Keep in mind that this was 1986. Though CDs existed, LPs were still the dominant format. Certainly, this album is structured with sides in mind. Each side start out with something up-tempo and ends with a short acoustic number.  But it all ended up too long for vinyl. The resulting omissions and edits diminish the LP version greatly from the CD or the cassette. But the LP was what most people got at the time.

2.) To a song, the endings are longer than anything this side of Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen.

Here's my critique, track by track.

This is The World Calling A power-pop lullabyfrom Bob to the world and from the world to Bob. The part of the world is sung by Lennox, McKee, and Moyet: "Close your eyes/ Sleep tonight" and we can only hope that Geldof finally did get some sleep that year. Beautiful and soothing. In The Pouring Rain For me, this is the best song on hereand one of my favorite songs ever. There are echoes of  "A Hard Rains Gonna Fall" only now it is fallingand in post Chernobyl Europe, 1986, the "lethal rain" was perhaps a little more literal than anyone would like. The lyrics are spare, emotional, and perfect. This is an essential Geldof recording.

August Was A Heavy Month
This song seems to my ear to have been put together backwards (not that theres anything wrong with that), with the entire song built around the lead guitar line. Its like a duet between Clapton and Geldof. Only Clapton doesnt sing, his guitar does. The song has easy emotional access, but not
the strongest structure. The lyric is lovely and unclear. When I first heard it in 86, I imagined Mother Theresa as "Baby Blue," but that theory doesnt necessarily hold up to closer inspection.  Eric Claptons guitar work on this song sounds like a younger, earlier Clapton, but still as fluid and evocative as the mature incarnation. This song may have served as a partial jumping-off point for Claptons subsequent album of the same year, August.

Love Like a Rocket
Geldof, aware that we stand on the shoulders of giants, has never been shy about using quotes and references from previous pop music. But this goes beyond that. Its a full-scale update of Ray Davies "Waterloo Sunset."  Twenty years later, as might be expected, life has worked its heartbreaking
ways upon Terry and Julie. And the once-paradise-evoking Waterloo sunset serves only as a reminder of broken dreams. Claptons guitar weeps, but not gently. It cries unabashedly. This song should have been a hit.

I Cry Too
Present-day interviewers seem to love asking Geldof if he ever intends to write a song about Paulas death. They might want to shut up and listen to this one. I have no idea who, if anyone, it was actually about back in 86, but it seems to reverberate over the decades. The angelic backup singers are
used to great effect here. So much so that Im not sure the song would work without them (live, say).

When I Was Young
This one goes hand-in-hand with Geldofs then just-written autobiography,  Is That It?, but it leaves out the facts and figures and gives us an emotional take on the hopes and dreams of his younger self. The beginning and the end come from somewhere else. The first few lines are, perhaps about someone who lived great and died too early. This sparks the trip down memory lane.  In the last bit of the song, Geldof pulls the rear-view mirror out of the vehicle of his psyche and drives forward. The song is awkward, but powerful. The LP version is edited to the point of ruin.

Truly True Blue (not on LP version)
Just a minute and a half long bit of a song at the end of the first side.  Less structured than its fellow acoustic bookend at the end of the album, but more of an emotional outpouring.

This Heartless Heart
As close to a throwaway track as youre going to find on this album. But it has its moments. It leans heavily on the backup singers (hey, theyre there, why not use em, right?). The verses are sort of
Mary-From-the-Fourth-Form-lite, the choruses are very strong, and the break is Geldof telling off all the people who are bringing him their thousands of less-than-worthy pet causes instead of doing something about it themselves.

The Beat of the Night This has never been my favorite track. But it has grown on me some. It is basically Geldofs version of "The Raven" or something. The narrative is an imagined Hitchcockian horror scene, perhaps used to distract the author from actual horrors witnessed up close in Africa. I understand that this song was something of a hit in the UK and Europe (insert your own France/Jerry Lewis joke here).  This is the first time youre likely to hear Clapton play on a rap song. His playing is atmospheric and sublime.

Pulled Apart by Horses (not on LP version)
Geldof noted at the time Deep in the Heart was released that any song he came out with would have been interpreted as being about famine and Live Aid. But this song actually is. He puts things in their geopolitical contexts, then lays the blame for famine and torture squarely and accurately upon the
political ideologues of the day, who acted out a politics in which two global super-powers backed any scum-bag mass murderer dictator who would join with them against the rival super-power. Looting your nations treasury? No prob. Starving your people? Great! 95% of your populace doesnt support you? Let us sell you some weapons. Because the important thing isnt peoples actual lives. The important thing is our little pissing contest over whether the state or the marketplace should be the greater force in distributing goods. The fact that your country has never had much of a state or a cash economy is totally irrelevant. Well manufacture one. Geldof sings "be in no doubt that these things exist because of our love of cheap ideology."  Drought, yes, but starvation on this level comes primarily from political considerations.

He touches on the absurdity of a time when pop singers are the ones trying to solve serious problems like famine, global warming and Apartheid while our actual political leaders seemed to only get in the way. Then he takes it to a personal level, pointing out that, after years of it, he feels drawn and
quartered. The song starts out "If I called out all those places where/ Brutality still stomps and tramples everything/ And the dignity of peoples lives lives only in there eyes and in their suffering." Perfect! Anyone who bought the album hoping for great insight from the living saint could have
found it hereif they picked up the cassette or chose to invest in a brand new format called CD. The LP buyers were out of luck, which is a shame, because this is one of the three best songs on the album. The only non-great thing about it is the "U2 ending."

Words From Heaven
I dont know if this is about a specific person, but it is in praise of someone who is tortured for speaking truth, then later, perhaps posthumously, praised as a prophet. The verses are powerful, the choruses less so.

Good Boys in the Wrong (not on LP version)

This song has a great beat, some of Geldof's most interesting singing on the album, and the fourth and final appearance by Clapton. And yet, somehow it still doesn't quite work.

Night Turns to Day
Sprawling and unwieldy, this is nevertheless a great song. The emotions ring true and the images are powerful. We find the narrator snuggling his beautiful sleeping baby, but unable to get the horrors of the world out of his mind. The juxtaposition of the perfect sleeper breathing her "angels breath" onto her haunted father; and his mental image of a schizophrenic with bleeding gums and knowing eyes sparks an inner, philosophical struggle between adolescent moral absolutism and the guilty hopes of a tender parent who acknowledges that he is part of a flawed society.

Deep in the Heart of Nowhere
Spare, short, and  acoustic like its sibling "Truly True Blue," the title song finishes things up in stark contrast to the rest of the album. It works well and gives us a promising hint of what is to come a few years down the road.