LP reviewed in Sounds, 27th February, 1982
SECRET AFFAIR ‘Business As Usual’ (Arista TCSPV 3) ****
ONE FEELS, and one is sure one is correct in feeling, that on the old credibility scale, if one may be excused for employing such crudity in the matter, Secret Affair hone in somewhere slightly lower than Brown Sauce.
SA are delightfully corrupt! With ‘BAS’, possibly the most damned LP title I have ever set ears upon, the sort of thing Climax Blues Band would, rejoin together around, SA almost make an art of their delapidation It is terrif.
Ian Page, it is true, is more Sid James than Bruce Springsteen. Page is the very worst type of wimp, the flash Harry sort. On ‘BAS’ he ewes the coffers falling gravely short since Mod’s nosedive in the sand. And he gets frantic!
Secret Affair | Business As Usual | (Arista) 1982
‘BAS’ is like a toytown album. One could picture its never-letting-up pace as Page and sideboy Dave Cairns frantically flick through their yearly used cheque stubs and learning the worst (bankruptcy, Mod is dead, gulp) and rushing away to record an LP’s worth of red heat, ultra commercial stuff in about, oh, half an hour.
‘BAS’ goes at 78 rpm. Page writes his myriad hooks with the same feeling and precision accuracy as Norman Tebbit cuts education figures. BAS’ is so conservative it must raise a fond giggle from anyone who has ever clapped ears on a 23 Skidoo (ecstasy) or a Killing Joke or a Virgin Prune (the horror).
A refreshingly corrupt and steely efficient harking back to ‘basics’ (viz final letters from Barclays), ‘BAS’ sounds as though it (simply) can’t afford to be full of crap.
Its flashing by, one feels, is akin to an old Ealing Comedy flashing past. An agreeable nostalgia. It cannot harm us because it is so determinedly safe.
This recharged SA’s fierce conservatism is valuable. Propped upon a set of 78 1/2rpm songs that predate Dr Feelgood in their overall style as much as they predate Beowulf, its a conservatism that serves useful in showing up why they’re running scared.
Secret Affair | Business As Usual | (Arista) 1982
‘BAS’ is an album to put your feet up to, and feel inclined to dance madly to at the same time. Its ace hard realness shows up a lot of dumbheads who’d scoff at our Sid Page. One revels in it and out of it.
“Saw the news todaay/lt looked so graay”. “One daay you’ll have it all/your own waay!”
That pleasing, revoltingly nasal extra “aa” voice! The fairy grotto guitar jangling! The bright lights! Winthrop’s brilliant sexy sax! The sheet metal structure of it all!
Mod is dead, okay. Sid Page may be Scots Porridge Oats between the ears, but, dears, one has never enjoyed a funeral service so much. (Dave McCullough)
EGO WITHOUT A CAUSE
Business As Usual (I Spy)
YOUTH MUSIC has always had its pied pipers and spokespersons — those who are willing (often more willing than able) to speak for a generation. It’s a position which demands a lot of arrogance, and Ian Page had plenty. What he lacked was a generation, a genuine and profound change in society which had its parallel in a musical movement. Instead, Page had to settle for a superficial revival, for all those nouveau mods and Glory Boys of three years ago.
Even at the time, people wondered how the false prophet would live it all down. The answer is easy, if Page’s NME interview with Gavin Martin is anything to go by: all you do now is pretend that you didn’t really mean what you said, or that you meant it differently, or that you were mis-reported and misunderstood.
How convenient for Page to bury his head in the sand and hope that people won’t take the wrong kind of notice of a re-emerging Secret Affair. He obviously feels that if he plays down his erstwhile spectacularity, he won’t be seen as a fallen idol, but rather as just another person of reasonable stature quietly going about their business carving out a niche on the music scene. Hence the pragmatic and mundane title of Secret Affair’s third album ‘Business As Usual’.
But the music itself gives the lie to all these strategies, because the modification which Page seeks in his own image and his new moderation of language can’t conceal that the fact that his songs are just the same as they’ve mostly been, anthemic and hectoring rather than urgent and relevant.
‘Business As Usual’, like ‘Glory Boys’ and (to a lesser extent) ‘Behind Closed Doors’, doesn’t so much rework the ’60s as ghost them, rather as if Secret Affair had been dreamed up by a media hack for a musical part in one of those terrible Swinging London films.
The band are shallow and shrill also by dint of their very repetitiveness. Page and Dave Cairns keep writing the same song: ‘Time For Action’ (almost tolerable as a first) is here re-done as ‘Follow The Leader’. The title of the song is ironical, but that’s all. Sure, Page gets passionate, but about what? Even he doesn’t know: he displays his ego only to reveal a vacuum. (NME, 20/03/82)
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