REVIEW: Guy Chadwick—Lazy, Soft and Slow (1998, 2025)
The House of Love's main man's excellent overlooked solo record finally released on vinyl.
Quite often bands release their final album, and split before bothering to tour it. The Smiths did it with Strangeways Here We Come, Ride did it with Tarantula. The House Of Love did it with the excellent, but barely known Audience With The Mind.
I was quite salty about this. The House Of Love were one of my main teenage bands. The kind of band I’d jump on a train to an unknown city to go and see, aged 15. The kind of band I’d record Peel Sessions by, hand poised on the tape deck to hear precious new tunes a year ahead of their eventual release.
When I moved to London in ‘94, it was apparent Guy Chadwick had a new band, The Madonnas. They fleetingly played gigs, but pre-internet, it was incredibly tough to find out about such shows unless you happened to grab a flyer while out and about one night. After that, I heard nothing more for years. He’d gone to ground, quite evidently.
But then in late 1997, he returned with a single, the glorious This Strength, followed by an album recorded with the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie. He was back.
It was a weird time for music in early 1998. The Britpop party was over, well and truly, and it felt like the still-powerful music press was adopting a scorched earth policy, essentially disowning anything to do with it. There was a collective shrug towards Chadwick’s return.
In the not too distant past, his band were front cover regulars, and feted as The Next Big Thing. But his long-awaited solo debut—despite being a great set of songs—did not get the Welcome Back it probably deserved. Such was the way of things back then.
The disposable nature of generational talents knew no bounds, and it was an ugly, toxic scene, in that confused lad/ladette phase. I saw the insides of the NME in King’s Reach Towers at this exact point, as I was assigned somewhat futile work experience there, with Steve Sutherland the main man, and the likes of Johnny Cigarettes and Kitty Empire breezing in and out. Looking back, this was the beginning of the end for the mag, and the old school music press in general. Still caught in the old ways, desperately trying to break a new act every week, and happy to utterly disregard older artists, presumably for the crime of being over 35.
That’s not to say that Guy Chadwick’s Lazy, Soft And Slow was a record they should have been losing their minds over. Like the title suggests, this is a mild, relaxed record—one you’d expect from a man just entering his 40s. But there was certainly a place for it, given its quality, and given the dozens of top-tier songs the man had put out in the decade preceding it.
In an equivalent situation, you just can’t imagine an album like this slipping out almost unnoticed these days. It feels like there is a far greater degree of cultural respect afforded in 2025, partly through the uniting qualities of the internet. Back then, you couldn’t exactly find an online House of Love community, put it that way.
And so the decision of Optic Nerve to finally put this overlooked record out on vinyl fully 27 years after it came out gives us all a chance to reassess it, and see how it stands up after all this time.
I guess the most obvious thing that jumps out is that it’s nothing like his House of Love work. Possibly deliberately, there’s far less edge to it. In his band guise, there was a general tendency to rock rock rock, with driving singles, and an intensity that few bands could match. The sweetness of Song For Gaia, next to Mirrored In My Mind are the sound of a songwriter at the top of his game. Neither were singles, but as album tracks go, these are as catchy as anything he’d ever done.
The honour of lead single went to the beautiful This Strength but the wise overlords of UK radio never gave it a flicker of a chance. If it got played, I certainly never heard it, and it’s of limited surprise that it didn’t dent the Top 75—and nor did this album, criminally.
I managed to catch Guy doing his solo tour in the early spring of 1998. He played a blinding set that night, but it was clear that his stock had fallen in terms of venue size and general buzz. Just over five years before, he was playing The Royal Albert Hall. Now his first solo album had entirely bombed commercially.
None of that matters now, of course. Listen to total gems like Close Your Eyes and Crystal Love Song and tell me this album deserved to be ignored.
Happily, The House of Love reformed in 2005, did countless victory laps, released several albums of solid new material, and Guy has continued under the name with a new lineup, perhaps mindful that the last time he dropped the brand, people lost interest.
With the benefit of time and distance, any House of Love fans that let this album pass them by, or simply haven’t heard it in decades, this belated vinyl release provides a timely reminder. Kudos to Optic Nerve, also, for packaging the record with an excellent lyric book, and adding on two tracks that were previously on the You Really Got A Hold Of Me CD single. [Shame there wasn’t room for the two other stray b-side tracks to make it really definitive, but space considerations unfortunately restrict what vinyl can reasonably hold before it all starts to sound bad.]
Maybe now this is out the door, Optic Nerve can turn its attention to the one House of Love album that never got a vinyl release: The 2005 comeback album, Days Run Away the one with Terry Bickers back in the fold, as unlikely a reunion as there ever was.
